Nature Archives

Fish(y) Stories

Nature, Science
May 6, 2019
0 Comments

Last week CBS news published an alarming article predicting that by 2048 salt water fish might be extinct. Just the kind of news you glance at and decide an already bleak view of the future has become even more dire on a sunny Monday morning.

Independent of our own delight in seafood, millions of people in the developing world depend on fish as protein source and for their livelihoods. Never mind what’s at issue for the larger food chain depending on healthy oceans.

Here’s the problem: it is a story that has perennially surfaced in the news since 2006 when the study it relies on was first published. Never mind that the scientific authors fundamentally revised their findings in 2009 because the study was relying on seriously flawed data and statistics.

You might argue that the criticism comes from the seafood industry and their own data are equally sketchy, driven by the desire to maintain the economic gains from fishing. But it is not an isolated case.

Three years ago there was much discussion of reports by the MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea if we continue dumping plastic in the oceans at the present rate, measured by weight. Note that this claim rests on our ability to accurately measure the plastic and count the fish. Are we able to do that?

Their report certainly didn’t. It relied on plastic estimates derived solely from San Francisco Bay and assumed that was representative for the rest of the globe. The report never stated figures for the expected tonnage of fish in 2050, and cited no research into fish populations. When reporters went back and asked about this issue they were referred to a 2008 study which was refuted by its own author in 2015. (For details go here.)

The problem with these types of misinformation rests with the fact that it gives power to those who want to deny that our oceans are in trouble. Or, more egregiously, want to claim that science can’t be trusted in general. Generally solid reports like this one are then thrown out together with the unreliable ones, in the interest of delaying action and preserving current income.

The WWF report lists the main reasons for decline of fish stocks in our oceans. Overfishing and by-catch are due to illegal fishing and insane subsidies for the fishing industries. As a result we have degraded eco systems and decreased food security. Action is required to create areas protected from fishing and to stop the industrial subsidies that are incentives for expanding fishing fleets.

I leave it to you to judge if clips like this, earnestness notwithstanding, help the cause…..

There is, however, also good news, as reported in the Seattle Times this March (somehow the link is broken, but here is the upshot:)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is investigating whether new fishing restrictions are needed to help prevent the extinction of endangered southern resident killer whales that frequent Puget Sound. That process is intended to result in fishing that lessens the impact on prey targeted by the whales. Possibilities include restrictions in time and places when fishermen and whales most intersect, or season closures. And not only in the ocean: NOAA is also evaluating fishing in Puget Sound and southeast Alaska to reduce impacts on orcas. The agency already, through the Pacific Salmon Treaty, worked to cut back harvest rates on salmon in Canadian fisheries.

Photographs today are from Puget Sound where I had thrilling views of whales some years back.

Music is a mesmerizing piece by Adams Becoming Ocean that somehow manages to communicate the urgency of required action. Music starts in at 7:35 or thereabouts.

https://site-323590.bcvp0rtal.com/detail/videos/by-composer/video/6008570918001/john-luther-adams-become-ocean?autoStart=true

Rest

Nature
May 3, 2019
1 Comments

It’s been exciting weeks of travel and blurry re-entry and then, towards the end of this week, another successful attempt at anchoring in the place where I always find solace: Sauvie Island.

A portion of the island that is closed off for winter to allow migratory birds to rest and breed, opens at the beginning of May. All is still fresh and the cows think they own the place.

It gives me pure joy to wander along paths I haven’t seen in 6 months and recognize every tree still standing.

The eagle is re-using the old nest, still in position. The rest of the birds are busy building their own.

The forest path is sun-dappled,

the meadows still intensely green,

the oaks in fresh leaf

and small hawthornes in bloom.

And what comes to mind, on a regular basis, is one of Goethe’s poems, the second part familiar to me since I was 5 or 6 years old, that describes the peace trickling down through nature. It is set at night time, but easily converted to my day jaunts as well – a quiet calm descends from the larger realms of our surround to the trees, to the bird population and finally to ourselves, who are still waiting for it.

Here is a version of Wanderer’s Nightsong translated by Longfellow:

Goethe wrote this during a time of grappling with the demands of a new job at the Weimar court during 1776, unhappily in love, and trying to adapt to new-found fame as a writer (his Sorrows of Young Werther had exploded on the literary scene.) He inscribed the second stanza on the walls of a hiking cabin in the nearby mountains – you can actually hike a 20 km trail that links many of Goethe locations including this (rebuilt) hut on the Ilmenau, should you ever visit Thuringia. On my list to do. One of these days.

The trail begins at the “Amtshaus” in the marketplace, where the Ilmenau Information Centre and the Goethe Town Museum are housed. The Museum shows Goethe as a poet, civil servant and naturalist. Along Obertorstrasse, the trail runs to the cemetery first and then continues through the upper Old Quarter on Mittlere and Obere Berggrabenweg. On Schwalbenstein Rock, there is a hut where hikers can take a break. Goethe wrote the 4th act of “Iphigenie” here. Passing the Schöffenhaus, the Goethe Hiking Trail continues across Heidelberg Hill to St Mary’s Spring and the Emmastein Rock. Then it descends to Manebach to the Choirmaster’s House. The trail runs in Manebach through the Ilm Valley and at Kammerberg, the climb to Helenenruhe and the Grosse Hermannstein begins. At a height of 861 metres, the trail reaches the “Goethe Hut”, the highest point on the trail. Descending, hikers come to the Gabelbach Hunting Lodge Museum, which gives an insight into Goethe’s scientific studies of nature. After the Hirtenwiese Meadow, the route continues along the country road to Neustadt down to the picturesque Schorte Valley and Knöpfelstal Pond with a shelter and Finstere Loch with a small waterfall. After 20 minutes, the Goethe Hiking Trail arrives at the “Auerhahn” historic tavern and then leads to another Goethe Museum in Stützerbach.

In the meantime, I savor Sauvie Island, the mountains around us, and the blessings of nature.

Music today are Schubert’s version of both part of the Lied, and then one by Liszt for comparison.

Guten Appetit!

Nature
May 2, 2019
4 Comments

If you need a treat for the eyes, or, for that matter, the soul, I recommend a short outing to Camassia Natural Area which is protected by the Nature Conservancy. The small park, a 15 minute drive from PDX, is at the height of its beauty at this time of the year, when the Camassia bloom as do the blue-eyed Mary’s, an endangered plant of the snapdragon family.

Camassia, also known as Indian hyacinths or squamash, covered large areas of the Northwest before live stock, White settlers and eventually the construction of villages, towns and cities took over. When Lewis & Clark traveled here the meadows reminded them of large swaths of water, in waving blue.

On June 12, 1806, the day after he wrote his description, Lewis remarked: “the quamash is now in blume and from the colour of its bloom and at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.”

If you click on his description, you’ll get an exquisite botanical description and report on native usage, particularly using the bulbs from this plant from the asparagus family as nutrition.

Many NW place names, like Camas, WA, were derived from the plant which played a substantial role in the diet of Northwest Indian tribes. As migratory foragers they would travel in seasonal rounds, according to where the abundant food was to be found at a given time of year (hence the need for large territories). This migration followed a predictable pattern from permanent winter villages through several temporary camps, nearly always returning to the same locations each year. Before construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957, which flooded this area, Celilo Falls for example was a favored location to fish for salmon on the Columbia River. For starch they relied heavily on q’emes or camas root (Camassia quamash) as a food source; it was gathered in the region between the Salmon and Clearwater river drainages.

Here is a way to prepare the bulbs, if you have the patience….

In fact, you could have a whole meal from the plants you find at Camassia Nature preserve. Camassia as your main dish,

miner’s lettuce for your salad,

sprinkled with alyssum,

accompanied by cucumbers,

and for desert you can suck honey from the Rosy Plectritis (from the honey suckle family)

or have some wild strawberries.

And should you scrape your knee while getting off that picnic blanket – there is always saxifrage to the rescue, with its antiseptic and healing properties.

And if you need a nice glass of milk to go with all of this and your cow has udder problems, the nipplewort, also prolific in the area, will come to your rescue:

The name itself has an interesting history that originated around 350 years ago when an Englishman by the name of John Parkinson named the plant after he heard that it was useful for topical treatment of ulcers for women on certain areas of their bodies. It was also an herbal treatment for nursing mothers, and was used to aid cows and goats that were having trouble being milked. Another source of the name is said to have come from the shape of the basal lobes and their resembling features. Because nipplewort is edible, its leaves can be cooked like spinach or served raw in only the most hipster of salads.

The Nippleworts of Camassia Natural Area

Guten Appetit!

And here is César Frank on another edible: Angels’ Bread….

A Change of Weather

Nature, Travel
Apr 26, 2019
4 Comments

On my last full day in New Mexico I drove to Frijoles Canyon to explore the Bandelier National Monument. It is located within the Pajarito Plateau which was formed by two eruptions of the Jemez volcano nearby, more than a million years ago.

Each of these eruptions were about six hundred times more powerful than that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Just saying.

The rocks you are seeing in the photographs are actually volcanic ash, compacted over time into a crumbly rock called tuff.

It can be easily eroded by the weather or human tools – and indeed the Ancestral Pueblo people living here more than 10.000 years ago made their homes in the rocks, enlarging existing holes and caves and building in front of them.

Both petroglyphs and pictographs can be found here

A small, seemingly innocuous creek runs through the canyon, bearing water all year long, so important for human habitation, and even more so in this arid climate. The regular 10 cubic feet per second (cfs) occasionally converts into flash floods.

A horrid one in recent history followed the 2011 Las Conchas Wildfire, that completely destroyed the upper watershed of the stream.

The creek surged with 7.000 cfs of water; in 2013 it got even worse with a flash flood of 9.000 cfs – the piles you see in the pictures are the left overs of the uprooted trees and rocks and other debris that haven’t been cleared by the National Park Service. At the time they came down the mountain in waves reportedly three stories high. The clip shows the flood coming into the parking lot of the site.

https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/photosmultimedia/flood913.htm

These kind of weather-related events probably happened across the centuries but are now increasing in frequency. They would have cost many lives during the times people actually inhabited the canyon. In general, their life expectancy was short, 35 years on average, women regularly dying in childbirth and almost everyone suffering from bad teeth and arthritis. Men were responsible for hunting, constructing and weaving, while women did the farming, (grid gardens and scattered fields all across the mesa in hopes that localized rains would water at least some of the crop of beans, corn and squash), took care of the children, cooked, made pottery and regularly plastered the outer walls of the buildings.

I fiddled with my own life expectancy by deciding to dare climb into the restored cliff dwellings. It was worth it, but, honestly, a challenge. Some kind woman spontaneously offered to take a picture of me, so here is factual evidence in case you don’t believe me.

You had to do several of these, some longer than others, interspersed with staircases

I envied the ravens and the swallows who sail seemingly without efforts between the canyon walls.

Inside the cliff dwelling looking out into the canyon

Not much bird life to be seen, overall, although I did luck out with two owls, closer to Albuquerque, one sitting on the nest and her partner guarding them from across the path.

Also spotted were quails, a curved beak thrasher and an occasional woodpecker. And here you thought you’d get away from bird pictures…

A Change of Occupiers

The first humans to come to what we now call the United States got here on foot. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia some 20.000 years ago, perhaps even 30.000 – 40.000 years ago. They made their way up and down the coast by boats, nomadic tribes often driven to new places by changes in climate. Scarcity of food led to various intertribal fighting for resources, a culture fostering warriors, but also to tribal migration to climes where they could eventually settle.

The North American Indian people who live in permanent compact settlements in New Mexico are known as Pueblos, descending from the pre-historic Ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi). The eastern Pueblo villages are in New Mexico along the Rio Grande and comprise groups who speak Tanoan and Keresan languages, comprised of Tiwa, Town and Tewa, as well as Athabaskan.

At the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1539, the Pueblos had autonomously governed villages, where decisions were made in subterranean ceremonial chambers called Kivas. Hunting and gathering was supplanted by farming of corn, squash and cotton – the only crops available. Complex irrigation ditches were constructed and lined with clay to preserve water (the latter giving archeologists a leg up in mapping the water systems.) Plant plots were sheltered with gravel to prevent evaporation. Societies were matrilineal (inheritance went down the female line) and matrilocal (boys married into the villages of the girls.)

Hunting was communal, including the hunt for rabbits – up to 60 people at a time would cut their hair and weave it into hare-nets, enormously long structures that snared the bunnies, some persevered from 11.000 BC in the museum where I learned all the rest of it: the MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE in Santa Fe.

I had gone there to explore their exhibit Beyond Standing Rock which highlights encroachments and violations of Native American sovereignty, many of which have impacted Native health and sacred lands and describes what led up to the DAPL protests. http://miaclab.org/current&eventID=4044

As luck would have it, I was invited to a practically private 2 hour tour of the museum with an incredibly knowledgeable docent, who taught about the archeological finds, but also the bloody history the Pueblo people had to endure. Although they managed, after 90 years of Spanish colonization, to unite in rebellion and reclaim their land and independence (as well as the horses, sheep and fruit trees introduced by the conquistadores,) that success didn’t last long.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/10/1680-the-pueblo-revolt/

After the reconquest in 1691, villages adapted to colonial rule by incorporating some aspects of the dominant culture necessary for survival while maintaining the basic fabric of traditional cultured in some instances converting to Christianity.

Skip forward to the appropriation of land and treatment of indigenous peoples by the US government and military, with forced relocations, death marches and concentration camps that claimed every 2nd life of those displaced in the 19th century. Less deadly but psychologically equally damning were the more recent attempts to Kill the Indian in him and save the Man, which was the motto of U.S. government forcing tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation

Judicial decisions by the Supreme Court managed to weaken protections for the sedentary Pueblos wherever they could.

The United States Supreme Court, in the 1876 United States versus Joseph, declared that the Intercourse Act of 1834 was not applicable to the Pueblos of New Mexico. The Court viewed the Pueblos as having a settled, domestic existence and therefore were not subject to laws which were passed for the protection and civilization of “wild Indians.” The ruling denied the Pueblos the protection of the federal government and placed them within the jurisdiction of the local courts and officials. The Court did not define the Pueblos as citizens, and thus they did not have the right to vote, nor did they have the right to hold public office. While the Court excluded the Pueblos from participation in political life, it opened up the way for their lands to be appropriated for private enterprise by non-Indians.

https://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1066

In a most interesting bit, my docent added to descriptions of these politics a terse report on HUD, our Housing and Development Administration. HUD is actively building and distributing housing for descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo people. These dwellings, however, are rigidly restricted to sizes accommodating only a core family. The previously common multi-generational living situations are thus disrupted; this has the consequence that transmission of ancestral language, culture and religious practice by daily interactions with the elders is no longer happening. A sly mechanism to force acculturation, in the guise of guaranteed electricity and indoor plumbing.

I was trying to digest all this during a somewhat challenging hike at Kasha-Katuwe National Monuments (Tent Rock) within the lands of the Cochiti Pueblo. The canyon trail is a one-way trek into a narrow, “slot” canyon with a steep (630-ft) climb to the mesa top. One scraped knee and a head bursting with pride of my stamina later I enjoyed the excellent views of the Sangre de Cristo, Jemez, Sandia mountains and the Rio Grande Valley.

https://music.si.edu/video/members-cochiti-pueblo-perform-eagle-dance-2000-smithsonian-folklife-festival

And here are some interesting voices from a different pueblo.

And here are some photos taken by E. Curtis in the early 1900s in New Mexico – these are postcards, I was not allowed to photograph in the museum itself.

Spring Showers

To round out this week devoted to the natural beauty around us I paid a visit to the tulip farm. It ain’t Keukenhof, the Dutch garden, but it ain’t shabby either. Jumping from puddle to puddle, dodging rain clouds, trying to argue with yet another shower threatening my camera, I had a grand time.

It’s still early, more than half of the fields not yet in bloom, and the place going to be open for almost another month. But the foliage alone was thrilling, and what was open did not disappoint.

Neither did the perennial viewing of humanity; some dressed to match the flowers, or at least their color;

some ignoring the weather and appearing in apparel more fitting for July;

some clutching their unicorns, or shivering in their cow mobile,

and the workers on break happy to rest those muddy limbs and heavy rain coats.

Did I mention it rained? It surely made for beautiful light. And it felt like spring, a riot of soft, muted color, and pastel air.

Some new sights,

Short-stemmed, nestling like Easter eggs

and some names that made me smile.

My intention to post Sylvia Plath’s Tulip poem evaporated upon re-reading. It is just too depressing, written from hospital when she was undergoing surgery and on war-footing with those gorgeous flowers that disturbed the waxen peace of the ward. I will attach a link all the way at the bottom where she reads it herself only for those who need a dose of downward comparison.

It shall be William Wordsworth instead (and I just happened to photograph daffodils as well….):

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

So much dancing in that poem, so much dancing in my very own grateful heart from the joy that is spring in Oregon, dark skies or not.

And here is the perfect garden-in-the-rain music….

Moss Musings and Lichen Lament

Biology, Nature
Apr 4, 2019
3 Comments

This is the time for wildflower hikes, more to be found every single week. It is also the time where there is enough moisture and warmth in the air that mosses and lichens awake from potential dormancy and fill the world with green, or, for that matter, orange, yellow, white and black, depending on the species.

The distinction between mosses and lichens, at my pay grade, is simple. One is a plant and the other a sandwich. Or so claim the teaching materials trying to instruct grade schoolers about their environment. Mosses are multicellular organisms that are able to use photosynthesis, like any other plant. They can’t transport moisture though, and thus need to stay close to the surface to absorb it.

Lichen, in contrast. are a mix of different organisms, one enveloping the other, thus the metaphor. The assembly consists of fungi fused with algae or cyanobacteria, and, only recently discovered, yeast. The individual ingredients benefit each other – the algae provide food for the fungus via photosynthesis and the fungal layer protects the algae from drying out, or being damaged by the sun. The yeast, as it turns out, produces noxious stuff that keeps animals from eating certain lichen. The resulting intact surfaces of lichen carpets help to keep things where they’re supposed to be, sort of gluing them down.

Most interestingly, lichens are a superb bioindicator – another sentinel warning us of environmental danger and destruction. “Because lichens have no specialized protective barriers, they also readily absorb contaminants and are among the first organisms to die when pollution increases, making them good sentinels for air quality.” They are sensitive to acid rain (the culprit being sulfur dioxide, from coal plants or long range industrial emissions.) They also get hurt by ammonia and nitrates used in agriculture, and they accumulate metals from power plant emissions. When they die off, we know WE are in trouble.

The US Forest Service has had a bio-monitoring program for lichen since the 1990s,

http://gis.nacse.org/lichenair/

“in which scientists record census data on the diversity and abundance of lichens in thousands of designated survey plots across the country. They collect some samples and send them off to a lab for elemental analysis to identify the type and amount of pollutants. The data help federal agencies set pollution targets and map out areas where the targets are not being met, and they also help state and federal agencies that review emissions permit applications and existing regulations.”

https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i46/meet-the-sentinels.html

Who wants to bet that under the current administration pollution targets are changing, regulations are shifted – or for that matter, whole programs like these are terminated? Luckily, lichen are ubiquitous, and one or another of the up to 17.000 species will survive in regions where none of us would. We are the ones that will pay the health and environmental cost in our areas, when pollution is again unchecked.

In any case, I find all this fascinating; if you don’t, perhaps you can at least enjoy the beauty of these lifeforms as they cling to the surfaces around us.

Music today shall be Mahler’s 3rd – probably of his symphonies the closest to nature, in its description of glory and wrath, both. That should make your morning lively!!

Bonus: some daily wildlife!

Widow-makers

The term widow-maker probably means different things to different people. The uninitiated older-than-35-year-old set who has never heard of, much less played the video game Overcraft, is probably oblivious to the fact that the term refers to an assassin also known as Amélie Lacroix. The unconcerned younger-than-35-year-old set will have no idea that it is the informal term for a deadly heart attack that involves 100 percent blockage in the left anterior descending (LAD) artery. And all of us in the overlap of those sets will probably be blissfully unaware that it is a term used in conjunction with dreadful accidents in forestry.

The reason this came to mind was a conversation with a person who happened to come by when I stood in front of the tree below – or what’s left of it – on Monday. A large part of the tree had come down last year, luckily falling when no-one was around. The remaining stump, still taller than a person, seemed solid enough, but all of a sudden in the last few days all of its bark, huge pieces of it, had come down at once, forming a large pile.

I was wondering out loud if someone or something had attacked it, it looked so violent. The guy explained: this is a widow-maker. I learned that diseased or old trees not only have limbs that break off, hang in the crowns and topple down when forestry workers try to fell the trees. They often spontaneously shed their entire bark when shaken by wind or axes, and those can kill the people underneath. The passer-by had indeed a friend who met that fate while working in the Oregon forestry industry.

Walking home, I was thinking of how many of those trees I encounter in my regular wanderings, here in Tryon Creek, Forest park, Oaks Bottom and out in the Gorge. How much depends on luck, not to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And how overthinking of the possibilities can lead to levels of anxiety that would make it impossible to explore my world. This in turn lead me to remember a psych paper I read (with the advisory that the research area of personality is often subject to non-replication problems.) But here is the argument, a theoretically interesting one, in a nutshell (all research details and data sources can be found in the link below):

People have different attachment styles, some being secure, others less so. This leads to different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to how we function in life in general and face threats and dangers in particular. A third of us are securely attached and faring fine, the other two thirds not so much, being either highly anxious or avoidant. Why would evolution tolerate such a mix? It seems that independently of what it means for an individual to be anxious, or avoidant, or securely integrated, these differences in style might have huge positive implications for the social groups we live in.

For example, people who are close with their family members are less likely to react to noises or alarms indicating impending danger, like a fire. They only react to unambiguous signs, like flames and smokes, when precious time is already running short. Highly anxious people, on the other hand, are like the canary in the coal mine, sentinels who signal early warning.

Avoidant people are also late to realize danger, but then act quite decisively to rescue themselves, and their protective action signals to others the presence of danger as well as potential escape routes. The avoidant person’s survival behavior then might also, if unintentionally, save other people’s lives.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4261697/

Now, all of this might be of no relevance if I walk alone in the woods, but it is reassuring to think that we as a social species have evolved to help each other out in social situations with present danger, whether consciously or not. Probably won’t be my last thought, though, when that branch hits……

Music today seems to beckon for Dvorack’s Silent Woods…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZYmFWcHdB4

And here is one of the most beautifully written essays on facing just this kind of threat. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/20/magazine/kayaking-trip-alaska.html

Twigs and Stones

About a 5 minute walk from my house is a small neighborhood park, a refuge for kids, dogs and the rest of us. A patch of old-growth forest, it has a path circling the periphery which gives you a good 20 minute stroll and leaves the interior protected, for deer, coyotes, kids’ forts and all. On balmy spring evenings at dusk the high schoolers or L&C students hang out with Today’s Herbal Choice – and the whole place pleasantly smells like those initials. But I digress.

A few years back a tiny wooden fairy house appeared, lovingly constructed and painted, with a house number and doors and windows that could be opened. Then another, and another, I think at its peak there were over 10 of them, parked under or affixed to the trees. Kids would bring little toys to decorate, and dogs would ignore those, if you were lucky. A walk in the wood was no longer boring for the young ones and everyone had a blast to spot new houses. Well, not everyone. There was a serious discussion in the neighborhood association about leaving nature to be nature and not make it a kitschy theme park, and that was that. Everything disappeared overnight.

This spring, a spark of defiance appeared at the bottom of the trees. Small painted stones can be found in locations close to the path, and for those of us walking there daily it has once again become either a bit of joy at the creativity of the young artists and our own sleuthing for new ones, or a source of dismay that there is yet again artificiality introduced into nature.

(Some of you might remember that I have argued along similar lines in an essay on Botanic Gardens, but here we are talking about a sort of playground (albeit a nature one) for families. https://www.orartswatch.org/art-among-the-plants-a-lament/)

The presence and fate of these stones might be under dispute – the way twigs have been affixed in what I am about to introduce next should not be controversial – it is simply ingenious.

Meet eyesasbigasplates – a duo of women photographers who do spectacular work with older people who participate in creating their “costumes” from materials found in their natural surroundings. They introduce themselves and their work here:

We are a Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan and Greenland. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.

https://eyesasbigasplates.com

I adore everything about the idea (and admire the photographers’ technical skills as well – the images are of outstanding quality.) Collaborating with a group that usually falls by the wayside, making them active participants in their portraiture, using natural materials in such inventive fashion and creating portraits that simultaneously crystallize the person’s characteristic face and hint at something more fleetingly, almost magical – it’s just terrific. Why don’t I have ideas like that???? And why am I not the wisdom-radiating rhubarb lady??? All the portrait images are from this website: https://eyesasbigasplates.com/list-of-works/

A big shout out to T.L. who introduced me to this work.

Best fit for music today (magic in the forest!) happens to be one of my favorite operas of all times: Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Here is a Prague production from 1970, conducted by Bogumil Gregor.

Purim

Nature, Religion
Mar 21, 2019
2 Comments

Yesterday afternoon was the beginning of spring, and at sundown we saw the beginning of Purim.

This Jewish festival is a celebration of the courage of one woman to do everything in her power to save her community from evil attacks of anti-Semites, with her own life under threat. For once, there was a happy ending – Queen Esther, the woman in question, was able to convince her husband, King Ahasveros, to save the Jews in the Persian empire from attacks by the King’s vizier, Haman. Not so happy an ending for the latter – he and his descendants were hanged.

It is a boisterous holiday, with the story, contained in the Megillah, being read out loud, with people making lots of appropriate noises and appearing in costume (think of it as the Jewish version of movie night for Rocky Horror Picture fans.)

The costume part is actually an interesting possibility of cultural appropriation: some academics argue that the first Purim masquerading appeared around the medieval times when Jews and Christians first lived in proximity together. Mardi Gras or the Venice Carnival were tied to the vernal equinox and all involved costumed celebrations.

Here is a link that details history and customs, including the hotly debated question if we can trust the historicity of the story.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-the-odd-history-of-purim-1.5332554

My favorite Purim food – cookies, what else – is served and also added to gift baskets that are generously shared among friends and family. The cookies’ name is derived from two German words: mohn (poppy seed) and taschen(pockets). Mohntaschen, or “poppy seed pockets,” were a popular German pastry dating from medieval times.

Around the late 1500s, German Jews dubbed them Hamantaschen, or “Haman’s pockets, although earlier versions of the pastry had been known as Haman’s ears – see the etymology of the pun here: http://time.com/4695901/purim-history-hamantaschen/

Beyond feasting, making merry, and remembering a time when the actions of a single model individual saved a whole population, there is the proscription to give to the needy, matanot l’evyonim.

And here is a wonderful example of that in 2019: two orthodox rabbis in NZ are asking their congregations to contribute to the victims of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where 50 people were murdered last Friday.

Rabbi Ariel Tal, head of the Wellington Jewish Community Center, and Rabbi Natti Friedler, head of the Auckland Hebrew Congregation, issued a request to their respective communities, asking them to donate the traditional charity money given on the upcoming Purim holiday to support the families of the victims of the attack in addition to the Jewish poor.

https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Give-Purim-charity-to-victims-of-mosque-massacres-583933